Donna Jo Napoli Biography

February 28, 1948
•
Miami, Florida

Author

Napoli, Donna Jo.

Reproduced by permission of Donna Jo Napoli.

Donna Jo Napoli moonlights from her job as a professor of linguistics at a
Pennsylvania college to write books for children and young adults. Her
stories range from magical retellings of ancient or medieval folktales,
like
Zel
and
The Magic Circle,
to realistic, emotionally wrenching tales of kids confronting divorce and
death in their family, such as
The Bravest Thing.
An essay on her career in the
St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers
commended Napoli's "belief in the ability of ordinary
people to overcome and to survive."

Lost home more than once

Napoli never planned to become a writer. Born in 1948, she grew up in an
Italian American family in Miami, Florida, the youngest of four children.
She suffered from an eye problem that was not diagnosed until she was ten,
but once it was corrected, she became an avid reader. But there were still
other challenges in her early life. "We had no books in the
house," she recalled in an interview published on the
DownHomeBooks.com
Web site. "My father bought the paper—but only to read the
betting sheets and any news that might affect his chances to win
bets." In an article she wrote for
Horn Book
she revealed that her father was a compulsive gambler: "When
he'd make money at work, he'd gamble it—sometimes
completely away. Then we'd get kicked out of where we were living
and my parents would fight and I'd go sit in a tree and read a book
and live in the world I created inside my head."

Napoli was a talented student in her teens, and was accepted at Harvard
University. During her first year there she took a required composition
class, which had one fiction assignment. After her professor read the
assignment, she suggested that Napoli could pursue a career as a novelist.
"I decided then and there never to take another English
course," she wrote in the
Horn Book
article. "I simply was not going to be lured into a vocation that
was so financially unstable."

After earning an undergraduate degree in mathematics, Napoli decided to
study Romance languages in graduate school. These are Italian, French,
Spanish, and other languages descended from Latin. She went on to earn a
doctorate from Harvard in 1973. She also spent a year studying
linguistics, which is the scientific study of languages and their
structure, sounds, meanings, and relation to human culture. During her
college years she married and began a family that would eventually number
five children.

"I try hard to give my readers other places—to let them
experience via my stories cultures and lands that they might not be able
to experience otherwise—to give them what I sought in
books."

Math trained her to write

Napoli spent the next dozen years living and working in a number of
college towns, from Northampton, Massachusetts, to Ann Arbor,
Michigan. She became a professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College in
Pennsylvania in 1987, and also served as chair of its linguistics
department. She is the author of five books in her professional field. Her
first book for children,
The Hero of Barletta,
was published in 1988. Its story is based on an Italian folktale about a
giant who works to save the village where he lives from an invading army.
But Napoli's second career as a writer did not come about quickly.
"I spent fourteen long years gathering letters of rejection before
an editor finally bought one of my stories," she noted in the
Horn Book
article. Her early training in mathematics had served her well, she
believed. "To do math problems, you have to focus and work and
work.... So mathematics teaches persistence. And there may be no more
important quality for a writer than persistence."

Napoli only turned to writing fiction as a second job after she
experienced a personal loss. For months afterward she exchanged letters
with a friend, who came to her a year later, letters in hand, and
suggested they would make a terrific novel. "That's when I
realized I really love to write," Napoli told an audience of young
readers, according to
Winston-Salem Journal
reporter Kim Underwood. Not surprisingly, many of her books deal with a
loss or challenge, and often feature characters who are coming to terms
with a change or disruption in their lives.
Soccer Shock
was one of Napoli's more fantastical early works. It was also her
first children's story that was not a folktale retold. Its hero is
Adam, a ten-year-old who is jolted by an electric shock. As a result, his
freckles now talk to him, and Adam tries to use his newfound power to
become the winning athlete on his soccer team. Napoli wrote two other
novels in which Adam confronts various challenges,
Shark Shock
and
Shelley Shock.

Napoli's Major Works for Young Adults

The Magic Circle,
Dutton, 1993.

Zel,
Dutton/Penguin, 1996.

Song of the Magdalene,
Scholastic, 1996.

Stones in Water,
Dutton/Penguin, 1997.

Sirena,
Scholastic, 1998.

Crazy Jack,
Delacorte, 1999.

Beast,
Simon and Schuster/Atheneum, 2000.

Three Days,
Dutton, 2001.

Daughter of Venice,
Random/Wendy Lamb Books, 2002.

Breath,
Simon and Schuster/Atheneum, 2003.

The Great God Pan,
Random/Wendy Lamb Books, 2003.

Overcoming phobias was the theme of Napoli's 1994 book
When the Water Closes Over My Head.
Mikey, age nine, is terrified of taking swimming lessons, and his older
sister teases him about it, but he eventually learns to overcome his fear.
Booklist
's Hazel Rochman liked the fact that Napoli's characters
debunked gender stereotypes—Mikey cooks better than his sister, and
his little brother likes to play dress-up. When their grandmother
disapproves, Mikey defends his brother. Rochman also noted the way Napoli
had the characters interact at several levels, where they "bicker
about breakfast cereal and also confront elemental issues of grief and
rivalry and love."

Napoli also wrote about a young man with agoraphobia, or the fear of
leaving one's home. The title character in
Albert
struggles to leave the house day after day, but is unable to do so. One
day he sticks his hand out of the window to check the weather, and a bird
begins building a nest for her eggs in it. Now he has to remain at the
window day after day, but in the process he begins to observe the world
outside. When the eggs hatch and the birds leave their nest, Albert
realizes he, too, is ready to leave and explore the world.

Her favorite book

Napoli has said that
The Bravest Thing,
one of her books for readers age eight to eleven, is her favorite among
the works she has authored. The story deals with multiple sorrows:
ten-year-old Laurel has a pet rabbit named Bun Bun who has a litter, but
Bun Bun refuses to nurse her babies and they die. Laurel decides to mate
her again, and the same thing happens. In the meantime, Laurel also learns
her beloved aunt has cancer, and that she herself has scoliosis, or a
curvature of the spine that will require her to wear a brace.
Napoli's handling of the difficult subject matter, noted a reviewer
for
Publishers Weekly,
"inspires the reader to believe that obstacles, no matter how
daunting, can be made smaller through courage."

Napoli's five children often provided story ideas in an indirect
way. One of her daughters, Eva, once asked her mother during a readaloud
moment why there were so many mean women in fairy tales. The question
prompted Napoli to write
The Magic Circle,
a twist on the classic Brothers Grimm fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel. It
is also the first of her books directed at young adult readers. In the
original tale, two children are abandoned in the forest on the orders of
their stepmother during a time of starvation in the land. They become lost
but discover a delightful house made of candy. An elderly woman lures them
in and feeds them lavishly, but then plans to bake them in an oven and eat
them. In Napoli's story, the dreadful witch had once been a
respected midwife and healer, but was condemned as a witch by her
community during a wave of religious fervor in late 1600s Germany. She
made a deal with the dark forces in order to save her daughter, but was
tricked by them and now must live a solitary forest life.
The Magic Circle
was named Best Book of the Year in a 1993
Publisher's Weekly
round-up, and won several other awards as well.

Besieged medieval village

A summer spent working on a farm when her children were very young
inspired some of the plot of
Breath,
Napoli's 2003 novel for young adults. The story's kernel,
however, is another reworking of a classic fairy tale. In this case, the
fairy tale was based on a real event: in 1284, bothered by a rat
infestation, the town of Hameln, Germany, paid a musician to lead the
vermin away. When the city then refused to pay the piper the money he was
due, he led the town's children away, too. Napoli read about Hameln
and was intrigued by the idea that the town may have experienced a bout of
ergot poisoning at the time. Ergot infests stores of rye and other grains,
and causes stillborn children, hallucinations, bouts of twitching, and
livestock deaths. Modern historians believe the ergot poisonings brought
on the odd behavior that incited witch hunts in many places throughout the
ages.

Breath
is narrated by Salz, a twelve-year-old boy who has cystic fibrosis. This
is a genetic disorder that causes the lungs to fill with mucus; it has no
cure and only in modern times did its sufferers live to reach adulthood.
Napoli based her character on an old version of the tale, in which one boy
does not go with the other children to their deaths, and hints he was left
behind because he is disabled. In Napoli's story, the townspeople
come to believe that Salz, who coughs incessantly, is a witch, since he
has not succumbed to the strange disease that has overtaken many. This is
because he has not drunk any of the beer made from the ergot-infested rye.
Susan P. Bloom, reviewing
Breath
for
Horn Book,
called it an "intriguing tale" that could have stood on its
own without the Pied Piper story, "so compelling are the portraits
of its protagonist and family and the horrific events that beset
them."

Re-imagines fairy tales

Many of Napoli's books are retellings of classic folktales or
myths. These include
Zel,
the story of Rapunzel, and
Sirena,
a romantic twist on the Sirens who were said to have lured Greek sailors
to their deaths in the ancient world.
Beast
reworks the classic Beauty and the Beast story, and adds a language
lesson. It begins in Persia in the 1500s, and features a prince who is
turned into a lion as punishment. He makes his way to France, where he
knows there is a woman, Belle, and a rose garden that will save him.
"On this grueling trip the reader feels the prince's loss of
humanity," noted Bloom in a
Horn Book
review. The critic also noted that the story turns compelling when Belle
finds him in the abandoned castle where he is hiding. The Beast leaves it
only to hunt his own food, which repulses him. "Getting past her
initial fear, the courageous Belle cleans the Beast's muzzle of
blood," notes Bloom, and the two read together from
The Aeneid,
an epic Latin masterpiece from the first century
B.C.E.
Persian, Arabic, and French words appear elsewhere in the story, and
Napoli provides a glossary at the end for readers.

Napoli still teaches at Swarthmore, but also likes to visit schools and
meet her young readers in person. She has written books with others,
including
How Hungry Are You?
with mathematician Richard Tchen. With her son, Robert Furrow, she wrote
Sly and the Pet Mysteries,
which was published in 2004. She has also collaborated with her daughter,
Eva, on
Bobby the Bonobo,
a book about a pet monkey that is scheduled for publication in 2006.

For More Information

Books

St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers.
Second edition. Farmington Hills, MI: St. James Press, 1999.